discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep “the physiological reductionist project for dreaming has failed (dreaming also occurs in non-REM sleep), and cognitive psychologists should be addressing the formation and reporting of dreams.” Therefore, my interest in dreams and dreaming is based on an interest in great self-understanding, as well as a natural curiosity regarding the theories of dreaming and which appears most plausible in light of empirical evidence. This analysis will cover some of the major theories of dreams and dreaming, before investigating how dreams contextualize emotion. A conclusion will address the likely direction in the future of dream and dreaming research.
In the past four decades scientists have learned a great deal about the nature of sleep, a variation of consciousness familiar to all humans. We often perceive sleep as a uniform state of physical and mental activity, but we now know that as we sleep we move through a variety of different states of consciousness involving a good deal of physical and mental activity. It was J. Allan Hobson (Hobson and McCarley, 1977, 1335) who first proposed the activation-synthesis hypothesis to explain the connections between REM sleep, dreams, and dreaming, wherein he argues that “the neurological activity of the brain during REM sleep creates both the sense and the nonsense of dreams.”
During the course of an evening, most people evolve through four to six cycles of REM sleep. Just before REM sleep occurs, the gigantocellular field of the tegmentum (FTG) emits bursts of electrical signals throughout our brain. As this theory proposes, these electrical signals are responsible for the construction and content of our dreams. This theory was in direct contrast to Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to dreaming as wish fulfillment. In contrast to dreams being caused by our psychological condition, Hobson theorized that REM sleep and, therefore, dreaming...